Tuesday, May 17, 2011

CERTIFIED COPY - FILM REVIEW (2010 - directed by Abbas Kiarostami)

“We normally think of poetry as one of a number of arts; and so, it is clear, did Plato. But, if we now go on to look at the kind of thing Plato said when he was talking about art in general (including poetry but not limiting himself to it) and then at the kind of thing he said when he was talking about poetry only, we find a striking difference. In the first case (thinking of art in general or poetry merely as one among other arts) he treats it as a form of mimesis - imitation. Thus in the Republic we are told that poets and artists in general, are unreliable because they produce imperfect imitations or copies of nature; and Plato adds that, since nature herself is only an imperfect copy of an eternal and immaterial reality, the poet is a man who supplies us with an imperfect copy of an imperfect copy.”
- Owen Barfield

“‘Well,’ said Reason. ‘Try now to answer my third riddle. By what rule do you tell a copy from an original?’The giant muttered and mumbled and could not answer, and Reason set spurs in her stallion and it leaped up on to the giant’s mossy knees and galloped up his foreleg, till she plunged her sword into his heart. Then there was a noise and a crumbling like a landslide and the huge carcass settled down: and the Spirit of the Age become what he had seemed to be at first, a sprawling hummock of rock.”- C.S. Lewis______________________________________________________________________________________________

First released on May 18, 2010 at the Cannes Film Festival.

United States limited release on March 11, 2011.

This review may contain spoilers. (Sometimes the term "spoiler" can mean different things. In other words, usually, with a great film, once you decide to try the thing, it's preferable to read nothing at all about it, and to simply allow the story to reveal itself to you in its own way. On the other hand, I realize there are films upon which one isn't quite sure if one should spend the time and effort. You can just take my word for it that Certified Copy is absolutely one of these films. Or, if you still need a little convincing, I'm not going to reveal the ending so go ahead and read as much of this as you need to until you've decided to try it out.)

To state the obvious, most people will find Abbas Kiarostami's latest film, Certified Copy , incredibly dull. I believe the description film critics are also giving it is "pretentious." The entire film is simply a conversation. But oh the joy you'll miss if you are constitutionally incapable of sitting through, and reflecting upon, for only a short 106 minutes, this conversation. Of course, "conversation" is just one way of describing it. You could also say it was a "dare" or perhaps even a "duel," but more on that later.

First things first, I want to make it clear that Kiarostami gives us no reason for not taking this little story of his at face value. The man, James (William Shimell), meets a French woman antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche). They are strangers. They are interested in some of the same things, but they are also polar opposites. He is intellectual, cold, aloof and philosophical. She is passionate, warm-hearted, intimate, and whimsical. Both are very intelligent and thoughtful. He's a little full of himself. She's a little fanciful and idealistic. Some reviewers are concluding that they really are married, but doing so misses an important point in the story. More on this later.

At the heart of the film is a single idea, summed up nicely by the film's title (also the title of the book written by James). James has just written a philosophical book on art. In it, he makes the argument that the idea of something being real or authentic is just meaningless. A great work of art doesn't have to be the original copy in order to inspire or exhibit beauty to the viewer. In other words, a copy of something is just as good as the real something. To James, the word "fake" doesn't even have any meaning either. The derivative thing, the copied work, a forgery, or a replica work - are really no different from the original thing, the initial work, a archetype or a first work.

So, this French woman wanted to meet James to ask him about this book he wrote. (Is that just unbelievable? Do they have to be married really because no one really cares to question an author about the philosophical ideas of his book?) He's speaking at a book signing near where she lives in Italy, so she sets up a meeting with him. As they decide to go out for a drive and discussion, she begins challenging his main idea. Her sister, she says, agrees with him. Her sister is simple and prefers practical use to aesthetic value. In other words, her sister would argue that a mechanical gas fire in the fireplace is better than a hand built log fire in the fireplace. Binoche's character believes this is fundamentally wrong. She believes something that is real and authentic has greater value than something that is merely copied or faked. To her, these words do have meaning. And understanding that meaning - understanding the distinction between what is real and what is copied is fundamental to the lives we live.

Listening to these two talk is not dull. They each have sharp wits in their own way. She is immediately more likable and sympathetic than he, but that's just their personalities. Remember, he's distant and British; she's passionate and French. Since he asked her to get out of town for a bit, she decides to take him to a small quaint little Italian village to show him something. It's a clever idea to support her argument actually. She takes him to an art museum of sorts to see a beautiful old painting that was recently discovered to have been cleverly copied from an even older original work. In other words, it is the "real thing" when it comes to copies. She finds it special and paradoxical, he finds it ... dull. It's nothing new in his opinion. Copies like this sort of thing are everywhere, all the time, in every place.

His whole attitude towards the place is one of indifference. What value do any of these original or copied works have? Only the value, in his opinion, that the viewer subjectively gives them. Beauty, in his eyes, is solely subjective and determined only by each individual's own personal tastes. After all, she told him about how her sister likes her simple and stuttering husband. In and of himself, her sister's husband doesn't necessarily have value, but his wife gives him value in her own mind by caring for him. Again, value and worth are subjectively determined. If he doesn't choose to see value in the painting, then what's the big deal?

To get a better grasp of this debate, you really just need to watch the film. I admit I've only just seen it, and I immediately felt like writing as many thoughts that I could about the film down before I completely forgot all of them. Thus, I can't reproduce many lines of dialogue. But it's a discussion both worth having and worth listening to. However, the discussion/argument is just a prelude to the part of the film where the tension begins to build. These two next decide to go to a coffee shop, during which he has to step out for a phone call. While he's away, the waitress says something briefly to Binoche's character and it turns out the waitress is assuming the two of them are married. Almost on a mischievous whim, the woman decides to go along with it, and she creatively starts making up elaborate details about their "marriage" to tell to the waitress. This is also where the village becomes important. Not only does the village have an ancient building full of art, it also has an ancient tradition that a golden tree inside the building will bring luck to any bride and groom. Thus, the village is always full of people who go there to get married. Marriage becomes the subject used to test out these ideas.

The elaborate fiction of their marriage that she creates is further encouraged when he arrives back from his phone call to find the waitress asking him about his "marriage" and he decides to go along with it too. He's momentarily surprised, but when he sees the mischievous smile of this woman he's with, and when he listens to the elaborate details she has created about the problems they have in their marriage, he can't help but be impressed. And why not? And then, what starts out as a game turns into a meaningful conflict. What better way to prove their points to each other that they have just been arguing for the last couple hours? If he can show to her that, by pretending that they are married, contriving an inauthentic copy of a marriage is just as good as, or really no different from, the real thing, then he'll finally succeed in proving the very point that she has been so intent on challenging. If she can show to him that, by pretending they are married, the sham is not of the same value as the real thing, then she will have convinced him that the part of his book that so annoys her so is, indeed, actually wrong.

Thus, what begins as an amusing conversation and then turns to playful fancy develops immediately into a battle of wits. Both of them have left each other free to make up whatever details or memories of their marriage that they please in order to advance their own position. Both of them just have to keep playing along with pretending in spite of surprises that they are in a "real" marriage together. He, in order to show her that there's really no difference at all; she, in order to show him that there really is quite an important difference indeed.

But it isn't that easy. The match of wits between the two of them is fascinating to watch, but they both put themselves into playing their fake roles with such enthusiasm that it starts looking like the real thing. In order to play their roles, they both have to pretend to have the feelings of a married couple (married for 15 years is the story they get stuck with early on). But as they continue to discuss these ideas in the context of constructing a copy of a real marriage, they start getting into fights. Then, in order to play their parts well, their fights need to be emotional. But the line between pretending to feel and adopting the real feeling itself is a line difficult to discern. Both of them have lived long enough to have love and lost, and both have prior experiences to draw from in their making up stories about their "marriage." So both of them are inevitably playing with real experiences and real hurts from their past.

She finds it easier to put her real feelings into it sooner than he does, but once there, he can't help but respond. Storming off after having lost one argument that she almost unfairly (but it's not like they set any rules) contrives to make him out to be the bad guy in the marriage (constantly being away from his family, leaving her frequently for long periods of time on business, falling asleep on the night of their 15th anniversary), he thinks things through and comes back with an elaborately contrived story of his own about her (falling asleep while driving their son). The details are almost too perfect. It's no wonder so many other film reviewers insist on believing them. But simply assuming they then must really be married is, in my opinion, shortchanging Kiarostami. Half of their conversations and stories lose their magic if they're actually true. The genius of a man and woman both captivated by the other, going back and forth, masking their surprise and being impressed with the other's creativity, is part of what makes the debate between the two so riveting. It's like a dance.

Half the fun of this game they're playing with each other is making it up as they go along. There's an old statute of an affectionate man & woman in the middle of a fountain? They use it to discuss whether art is subjective, whether beauty is really only in the eye of the beholder, and whether romance and trust are really possible for a husband and wife. She says the idea of feeling safe in a marriage is a grand and noble idea. He says trusting any marriage to last, or the idea of a man and woman selflessly devoted to each other, is ridiculous and unrealistic. In other words, there are some things that he doesn't believe are real. He finds unrealistic people ridiculous. She brings this to his attention by constantly interacting with the new brides and grooms in the village. It's not a coincidence that this becomes a regular point of contention in their pretend relationship.

They do find each other attractive. There's a chemistry that builds between them early in the film. So as the debate continues, they both find it easier and easier to play their parts, and more and more believable that they really have been married to each other this long. After having drawn from their past experiences and frustrations to use against each other in this little competition of theirs, part of what gives their developing relationship its depth is that they each, at various intervals, seem to believe in the parts they are playing. Pretending that something is real can , under given circumstances, can begin to make something real. Sometimes, when you pretend, you can even forget what is real, for at least a little while.

Marriage is a union, a welding, a cleaving, a powerful development of intimacy and trust that ought to only strengthen with time. Over the hours that this man and woman spend together in the film, their intimacy with each other increases. Their understanding of each other strengthens. And the bond they are pretending exists in fiction starts developing of its own accord. They are really starting to feel close because they began pretending to feel close. She really has her feelings hurt by him because she has really begun to care about his opinion and his distance. He really starts to care about hurting her because her tears, that might have first been fake, don't look so fake anymore. How could she not, with this responsive disposition of hers encouraged by his sudden acts of gentleness, begin to really fall in love with him? How could he not, with a woman this fascinating, begin to really become captivated with who she is as a person?
So yes, they really start falling in love. But doesn't this prove his point? Wasn't a pretend marriage suddenly just as joyful and hurtful as a real marriage? He argued at the beginning that a copy of an original beautiful painting could give the same feelings and the same appreciation of beauty as the original work itself. Besides, if feeling and aesthetic sense is only subjective, then why would it matter what you used to cultivate your sense of beauty? They are surrounded by newlyweds in this village, many of whom will experience, in his opinion, all the same disillusionment, miscommunication and hurt that the two of them are experiencing in their pretend marriage for a day. So what's really the difference?

If you don't like his character for most of the film, is it because you find him pretentious or fake? He acts that way on purpose. To him, any personality or character trait he chooses to take upon himself is just as good as a real personality or character trait. There is no meaning in saying a real marriage is any better than a fake marriage, or an authentic relationship conveys feelings that could never be understood in a pretend relationship. The fact that he stays hesitant to keep playing this game is also part of his philosophical position. She falls for him before he falls for her. But, for her, doing so supports her challenge to his argument. Making her feelings, about a marriage created only by her a whim, turn into the real thing is part of how she can persuade him that what is authentic is more valuable than what is not. Falling in love with him makes her really care about changing him and winning the argument.

In her eyes, he needs to prefer the genuine relationship to the contrived one. It's probably easier for us to take her side against his. We've been taught that being authentic is to be preferred to being derivative. We believe real emotions are to be preferred to hypocrisy. Obviously. Of course. But, the terms "authentic" and "reality" are used so repetitively in our modern culture that they are often in danger of becoming cliches themselves. Products are labeled "authentic" or "original" all the time by marketing companies. If this is true, then what do we do when our preference for authenticity and reality becomes fake or contrived? becomes a fad? At the beginning of this review I said that most people would find the film boring. If you asked them why, they might say because the story and the conversation seems so pretentious and contrived. For instance, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw writes -

"It is a film that is pregnant with ideas, and for aspiring to a cinema of ideas Kiarostami is to be thanked and admired. But the simple human inter-relation between the two characters is never in the smallest way convincing, and there is a translated, inert feel to the dialogue."

What Bradshaw is missing is that most of the dialogue is pretend dialogue. I'm convinced they aren't really married, but they each decide to pretend in order to win the argument. Back to my last question, I'm also afraid a large number of people will see this film simply because they believe it to be authentic "art house" intellectual movie fare. Their consumption of what has been marketed to them as avant garde , outside of Hollywood, indie flicks has more to do with the image they want to build for themselves than it does with really caring about thinking about the ideas in the film itself. One of the worst problems with the character of James in this film is that his tendency to "think deep thoughts" is affected. When she looks at him, you can't help but imagine her thinking how he might as well be an entirely fake human being. This idea of copies and originals, real and fake, can be applied to people as well as to art. His hollow and lofty ideas come across as trying to justify himself more than they come across as his really caring about them.

But why is this idea of copies and fakes, of pretending that something is real and the authenticity of a thing, so fascinating? I can't help but be reminded of C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity , where he writes (in book IV, chapter 7 entitled 'Let's Pretend') that a Christian may just have to start "dressing up as Christ" in his or her actions to other people in order to be capable of following Christ at all. Lewis explains -

"... Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.

Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children's games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups — playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.

Now, the moment you realise "Here I am, dressing up as Christ," it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made less of a pretence and more of a reality. You will find several things going on in your mind which would not be going on there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them. Or you may realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash-up. Well, go and do it ..."

Ultimately, by living out their argument for a day, the man and woman in this film start loving each other. They begin by using words and they end by staking their very beings, heart and soul, into personifying each side of the argument. But by doing this, something unexpected happens. The majority of the film is a duel of sorts, not to the death, but to the heart. Both man and woman are suddenly confronted with something real - and that's each other and the possibility of continuing to love and spend time with each other. He didn't think there was any difference between reality and a copy of reality, but by copying something real, he found that he had created something real. A copy of a beautiful painting can be a beautiful thing. Pretending to have an intimate relationship creates a actual intimate relationship. Even if he's only had a hint of it for a day, he believes in it at the end. She didn't think it would matter to just pretend to be his wife, because she believed that a copy was not as good, meaningful or significant as the real thing. But by pretending to love him, she proved almost accidentally that pretense isn't as strong as reality because it can turn into reality.

What is the difference between fake and real, between the copied and the authentic? The difference is evident when you are suddenly faced with a choice between the two. In our lives, we are often suddenly confronted with the ability to choose between that which is fake & shallow and that which is actual & new. At the end of the day, the man and woman in this story are suddenly confronted with the fact that they can end their discussion, he can catch his train at the station, and they can never see each other again. They both have the ability to end their pretended marriage and to put a stop to the real intimacy that has developed between them over this slow afternoon of walking down the streets of a superstitious old Italian village. But do they want to? What are they going to choose? What should they choose?

This is the final question the audience, who has just watched a film (where actors pretend to be in real life) about two people acting out roles in order to make an argument, is confronted with. More films should confront us with more of these sorts of questions more of the time. Kiarostami is to be thanked for doing so.

It is our business, as readers of literature, to know what we like. It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like. It is our business as honest men not to assume that whatever we like is what we ought to like; and it is our business as honest Christians not to assume that we do like what we ought to like. And the last thing I would wish for would be the existence of two literatures, one for Christian consumption and the other for the pagan world.- T.S. Eliot

Book reviewing, through which literary critics form taste and communicate with the general audience, has languished. Bland, cautious, back-scratching reviews have become the norm. Over the past twenty years, the trend has been that if a review is likely to be negative, a reviewer will refuse to do it ... Hence my very rude, no-holds-barred reviews, which so many aggrieved letter writers, invoking sepulchral Victorian pieties, have condemned. When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.- Camille Paglia

If we don't begin with the fundamental theological idea that cinema is meaningful because God is present in history, I think we have misunderstood both theology and cinema ... Disciplined thinking about film theory and history will help us understand film well. Disciplined theological thinking will help us love and understand people well. Both disciplines are present in the film-watching occasion ... Don't watch movies unless you really want to learn how to love people better, and until you are willing to push yourself past the Redbox toward movies that will actually nourish your soul.- Michael Leary

There are two dominant modes of experience offered to us at present - actual (hence our appetite for reality TV, documentaries and 'true-life' drama) and virtual - the Web. Sometimes these come together as in the bizarre concept of Facebook: relationships without the relating. Reading offers something else: an imaginative world.... You only get that kind of language-possibility through reading at a high level; that doesn't mean difficult or abstruse - quite the contrary. What we think of as difficult is often only unfamiliar, so it can take a bit of time to get into a book. Reading is becoming a casualty of the surf-syndrome of the Web. Reading is not skimming for information. Reading is a deeper dive.- Jeanette Winterson

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.- Flannery O'Connor

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year after year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.- C.S. Lewis

Gradually through during the opening scenes of 'Joe Versus the Volcano,' my heart began to quicken, until I finally realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before. Most movies, I have seen before. Most movies, you have seen before. Most movies are constructed out of bits and pieces of other movies, like little engines built from cinematic Erector sets. But not 'Joe Versus the Volcano.' It is not an entirely successful movie, but it is new and fresh and not shy of taking chances. And the dialogue in it is actually worth listening to, because it is written with wit and romance .... The characters in this movie speak as if they would like to say things that had not been said before, in words that had never been used in quite the same way.- Roger Ebert

Once upon a time, Art worked in blissful ignorance of its own nature. It believed it was only a trade in the amusement and service of mankind, and existed to paint flowers to deceive bees, to celebrate feats of arms, to adorn council chambers, to charm away melancholy and to teach and inform the people ... Beauty came to visit it in secret; never was it stronger and more productive.- Edward Baird

Poetry is associated with profundity - with the uttering of thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Perhaps that's why some readers feel scared by poetry: they worry they'll be out of their depth. But not all poets set out to be deep. Some work skittishly, for a laugh. And others offer the pleasure of formal accomplishment, rewarding us with complex metres and cunning rhymes. Poetry is a serious business, but it isn't solemn or funereal. All it insists on is that we read carefully, with concentration.- Blake Morrison

Films of the Holy Cinema might be considered the “difficult movies”, and this judgment is correct. These films are in fact difficult, however this is not because the ideas are hard to grasp. Movies aren’t made for movie scientists. Anyone can understand any film if they are open to it. I firmly believe this. There is no correct way to understand a movie, even if the director believes there is. In reality a movie is difficult because of our resistance to it. We resist these films because they peel. Peel when very often we’d prefer to keep our layers intact. I battle with myself about this everyday. Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror is a film I’ve seen several times, and I can state without hesitation that it is the most profoundly meaningful film I’ve experienced thus far. Having said that, it’s the absolute last movie I ever want to watch. I will put on anything over The Mirror, usually a comedy I’ve worn threadbare. It’s a miracle that I’ve seen the film at all. Now this is complete absurdity. The Mirror is cathartic and each viewing results in a deeper, quieter, connection with myself that lasts for days. I am exhilarated, energized, and full of ideas. It makes my life better. And yet, in full knowledge of the intense pleasure and peacefulness the film gives me, more often that not I refuse to watch it. The peeling of layers disrupts routine living and thinking. And though this disruption is vital, it takes enormous mental and emotional strength to allow it.- Kartina Richardson

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are their words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.- Psalm 19:1-4, RSV

I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program, including its author’s, and not for any other reason than that there is no political program — any more than there is a theory of tragedy — which can encompass the complexities of real life. Doubtless an author’s politics must be one element, and even an important one, in the germination of his art, but if it is art he has created, it must by definition bend itself to his observation rather than to his opinions or even his hopes.- Arthur Miller

If what’s always distinguished bad writing— flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.— is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret Easton] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything.Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.- David Foster Wallace

Modern film 3D is like recording a song and then having someone else digitally insert a kazoo onto every other chorus.- Kenneth R. Morefield

Cinema, as Tarkovsky has shown, has vast potential to move into the depths. Yet it uses them just as infrequently as television uses its capacities. Rarely do we see on the screen something that enriches our soul, and doesn’t pull it out onto the surface, onto the field of petty passions. Of course, art cannot avoid passion. But great art shows that both passion and passionlessness of the spirit create a certain battlefield, a battlefield for the depths and surface.- Gregory Pomerants

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface level standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boring way there was.- Ernest Hemingway

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is not merely in the sense of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason for existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them; and I will venture to call that the disruption and the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist of splendid houses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity with its gargoyles and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey could go before all the horses of the world when it was really going to the temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means a lost donkey going nowhere.- G.K. Chesterton

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.- Ecclesiastes 3:11

The man who can make his fellows desire more worthily and wisely is doubtless performing a higher task than the one who enables them more amply to satisfy whatever desires they have.- Philip Wicksteed

... it's only possible to communicate with the audience if one ignores that eighty percent of people who for some reason have got it into their heads that we are supposed to entertain them.- Andrei Tarkovsky

The modern world, which has promised the artists everything, soon will scarcely leave him even the bare means of subsistence. Founded on the two unnaturalprinciples of the fecundity of money and the finality of useful, multiplying needs and servitude without the possibility of there ever being a limit, destroying the leisure of the soul . . . imposing on man the panting of the machine and the accelerated movement of matter . . . is imprinting on human activity a truly inhuman mode and a diabolical direction, for the final end of all this frenzy is to prevent man from resembling God.- Jacques Maritain

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.- Randall Jarrell

The arguments for purity of life fail of their due influence, not because they have been considered and confuted, but because they have been passed over without consideration.- Dr. Samuel Johnson

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn't guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and stay friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it's we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don't get along any more ... Indeed, we forget sometimes that a vital part of loving literature is hating certain books and certain writers just as hating Spurs is an important part of supporting Arsenal; and the embarrassing truth is that I have probably got far more satisfaction out of trying to persuade friends that 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is a tawdry piece of misogynistic torture porn than I have out of discussing the reason why 'Wolf Hall' is a masterpiece.- Mark Haddon

... anxious people challenge me about reading 'serious' literature in our shared-reading groups. Why not, they will often say, read 'lighter' stuff - surely easier for people who aren't feeling too happy, or who have different social norms?The plea for lightness may be a natural and entirely understandable fear of getting serious: lots of us spend a great deal of time not thinking, for fear of being brought down. Often, too, the person who imagines the 'lighter stuff' as being more appropriate ... that person, often in authority, is still simply afraid of the word 'literature' and especially afraid of 'poetry'.... It is easy to see why, when dealing with literature or life stuff, people think it better if we stick to the surface of things and splash around up there, lightly pretending there are no depths, when the depths seem either umplumbed and terrifying, or, on the other hand, intimidatingly aesthetic, to do with a specialist, professionalised and narrow form of education.- Jane Davis

... 'O plunge your hands in the water,Plunge them in up to the wrist;Stare, stare in the basinAnd wonder what you've missed.'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,The desert sighs in the bed,And the crack in the tea-cup opensA lane to the land of the dead ...- W.H. Auden

Equipped with BlackBerry and laptop, sporting a flashy profile page and a blog, teenagers pass words and images back and forth 24/7. The bedroom is no longer a sanctuary, it's a command center. E-mails, text messages, blog postings and comments, phone calls, tweets, feeds, photos, and songs pour in every evening, and if kids don't respond, they fall behind ...... people don't have time, energy, or guidance to ponder the Federalist Papers or read The Divine Comedy. Every hour on MySpace, then, means an hour not practicing a musical instrument or learning a foreign language or watching C-SPAN. Every cell-phone call interrupts a chapter of Harry Potter or a look at the local paper. These are mind-maturing activities, and they don't have to involve Great Books and Big Ideas [all the time]. They have only to cultivate habits of analysis and reflection, and implant knowledge of the world beyond.- Mark Bauerlein

... And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, 'in another dimension.'... it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy ... I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.- C.S. Lewis

The major premise of the argument is that every natural or innate desire in us bespeaks a corresponding real object that can satisfy the desire. The minor premise is that there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature, can satisfy. The conclusion is that there exists something outside of time, earth, and creatures which can satisfy this desire.- Peter Kreeft

... with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction today, and more patently among the serious writers than in the underworld of letters, tend to become less and less real ...If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness, and a redistribution or increase in purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of an elite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous.- T.S. Eliot

I've always had this sense that there is another language I once knew, a joy that was mine before I was born. When I get a glimpse of that glory through art, I can feel the memory of it pressing against the back of my mind, and the longing for that peace and resolution wells up inside me. I can't quite grasp it. I can't speak my native language. Not yet ... but I'm learning.If I do the difficult thing and pull myself away from art that is merely entertaining and start searching for those currents of truth that reside within beauty and mystery, I will be drawn off the path of familiarity and comfort. The reality of God is not bound to a particular earthly language, country or style. His Spirit can speak through anything. But He is far more likely to be encountered in those things that are excellent rather than shoddy, particular rather than general, authentic rather than derivative.- Jeffrey Overstreet

We have no doubt that cliches are, in the artistic context, a fault: they show inattention, routine thinking, emotional laziness. They are a way of passing over things, without troubling to observe them. They show, in fact, ... a turning away from the realities, so that pretend observation and pretend emotion stand in place of real engagement with the world. Reality has a cost attached; and the use of cliches is a sign that someone is not prepared to pay that cost.- Roger Scruton

But a large segment of the secular world nevertheless maintains a higher standard than the Christian arts and media. This, it seems to me, can be understood simply by the fact that the secular world at least has the standard of the marketplace which it must meet.The Christian world has not even a poor standard, because it operates on a double standard principle. It judges its spiritual activities, in which it includes its media and arts efforts, by spiritual standards, unlike the standards it applies to the rest of life. Thus an art work, song, or whatever can be highly acclaimed because of its spiritual content, even if it is a miserable exhibition of a lazy addiction to mediocrity, which denies those very spiritual facts it is claiming to proclaim ... Because of our mediocrity we Christians all too often provide the excuse the world is looking for to ignore the truth of Christianity.- Frank Schaeffer

I sat next to a middle-class French countess the other day who announced to me that she did not like Bach. I felt like asking her, did she like color, or fresh air, or trees - when suddenly I realized that she figured that her dislike of Bach was Bach's fault - such is the egomania of democratism. If one really doesn't like Bach, why I suppose one shouldn't listen to him. But one should then be disturbed about oneself, not about Bach.- William F. Buckley, Jr.

Sometimes we are haunted by a phrase of music, sometimes by a passage in a beautiful painting, often by a story.- Charles Laughton

Reading the Bible means that you can read anything else - and it makes Shakespeare easy because the language of the King James Version is also the language of Shakespeare. We had a strong oral tradition in the north of England, and people often forget that not being able to read, or not reading, even fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago, was very different from not reading now.We live under 24/7 saturation bombing from an enervated mass media and a bogus manufactured popular culture. If you don't read you will likely be watching telly, or on the computer, or listening to fake music from puppet-show bands.- Jeanette Winterson

If we read fast, superficially, for plot, to get through, so as to congratulate ourselves we've read a book that everybody else is reading, or just to get a shot of intense feeling, we're not only missing out on certain pleasures, we're actually putting ourselves at risk, leaving ourselves open to messages and attitudes we haven't weighed up, allowing ourselves to be troubled or enthused, or even terrified, without really knowing if there's any cause to be.... Don't be a pushover. If you feel the writer's careless - he's trying to run before he can walk, he imagines you're a sucker for a bit of blood spilt in the first sentence, or in need of easy sentiment, or titillation - you have every right to resist. You have every right to put a book down after a couple of pages, which is why it's always wise to read a little before buying. Life is simply too short for the wrong books ...- Tim Parkes

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.- C.S. Lewis

Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the Pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no Work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day?Ship-loads of Fashionable Novels, Sentimental Rhymes, Tragedies, Farces, Diaries of Travel, Tales by flood and field, are swallowed monthly into the bottomless Pool: still does the Press toil; innumerable Paper-makers, Compositors, Printers' Devils, Bookbinders, and Hawkers grown hoarse with loud proclaiming, rest not from their labour; and still, in torrents, rushes on the great array of Publications, unpausing, to their final home; and still Oblivion, like the Grave, cries, Give! Give!How is it that of all these countless multitudes, no one can attain to the smallest mark of excellence, or produce aught that shall endure longer than a "snow-flake on the river," or the foam of penny-beer?- Thomas Carlyle

Yet, though most of us watch movies and are affected by them, we seldom try to understand what we have seen, let alone relate it to our wider religious beliefs and practices. After all, film is one thing, and our religious faith is quite another. Such a disconnect is understandable, at least on the surface. Movies are, on one level, mere entertainment - escapism. Our spiritual faith, on the other hand, concerns our vocation and destiny; it is foundational ...When we go to a party and must make conversation with new people, is it not a recent movie that provides the smile of recognition and the conversation starter? Even in the church or the synagogue, theological discussion is often more likely to happen following a movie than a sermon. Movies cannot be dismissed as simply entertainment and diversion, though they are also that. Rather, movies are life stories that both interpret us and are being interpreted by us. The power of film can change lives and communicate truth; it can reveal and redeem.- Robert K. Johnston

"Know the moderns in order to answer their difficulties and their expectations." A touching intention. But this way of projecting the "modern" into an objective concept, of separating oneself from them from the outside, makes this good will useless.- Henri de Lubac

... Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,One. Yes I can tell such a key. I do know such a place,Where whatever's prized and passes of us,everything that's fresh and fast flying of us,seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with,done away with, undone,Undone, done with, soon done with,and yet dearly and dangerously sweetOf us, the wimpled-water-dimpled,not-by-morning-matched faceThe flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt, to to fleet,Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truthTo its own best being and its loveliness of youth ...- Gerard Manley Hopkins

To read these books is to undergo a sacramental experience. I feel differently in the company of men who have read Solzhenitsyn.- William F. Buckley, Jr.

My answer is simply this: everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action.- Roger Scruton

... About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity ...Hebrews 5:11-14 - 6:1, ESV

But my favorite part, easily, is the Beatles running down a flight of stairs and bursting outdoors into an open field. With "Can't Buy Me Love" soaring in the background, it is a moment so irresistible, so ecstatic, that it fills me, even to this day, with the feeling of being near to - but unable to possess - something profoundly important. After all these years, I still don't know what that "something" is but I feel its presence when I watch this movie.- David Gilmour on A Hard Day's Night

A society that represents the culmination of twenty-five hundred years of Western culture should have been able to feed its children something better than Norman Mailer.- Bryan F. Griffin

We want to convey ideas, images, commands, directions, or whatever, from the mind of the speaker or writer to the mind of his audience or his readers. Communication fails if it is not effective communication. But effectiveness, I submit, is only the beginning of the communicative art. My thought is that, just as there is more to eating than merely stuffing one's belly, so there is more to writing than merely being 'effective.' If the purpose of housing were solely to provide shelter from the rain, the Sun King could have erected an A-frame. Instead, he built the Palace of Versailles.- James J. Kilpatrick

For faith, the results can be dangerous. A young Christian can get the idea that her religion is a tiny, desperate thing that can't compete with the secular culture. A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality."- Hanna Rosin

It may be that books in the form of a printed publication will shiver for a decade or two, but they will never disappear. There they are, in libraries and homes and schools all over the world. Reading a book on a Kindle or an iPad is all very well - in fact it is better than all very well, it is splendidly practical - but it is not the same. A machine can never look like a book: books are far more beautiful. Books are like gardens; a Kindle or an iPad like a supermarket - it makes life easier, but one doesn't want to loiter in it. You can fiddle with books. Like gardens, they can be wonderful to look at. You can cuddle them and use them like a hot-water bottle; a machine can't do any of these things.- Carmen Callil

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpseOut of the corner of my eyeI turned to look but it was goneI cannot put my finger on it nowThe child is grown, the dream is goneI have become comfortably numb.- Pink Floyd

[Thomas] Carlyle was not only one of the last of the influential moral giants, standing like a beacon at the fatal intersection of human progress, lighting the way to the road not taken; he was also the most clear-eyed prophet of our present discontent. He was there when we took the wrong turning, and he warned of the spiritual and intellectual desert that we would find at the end of the road to cultural democracy.The danger, as he saw it, was in the distraction: ordinary men and women turned to "art," and the worship of art, only when they had nothing more important to do or to think about. And idle humans - bored humans - were not whole humans. They were shells, chattering away to keep their spirits up as the sun went down.- Bryan F. Griffin

Sehnsucht is one of those German words that it is almost impossible to translate adequately. Along with Weltschmerz (world weariness or taedium vitae), the stage director and author Georg Tabori called Sehnsucht one of thsoe quasi-mystical terms in German for which there is no satisfactory corresponding term in another language ...Despite these rational objections, once people have been gripped by Sehnsucht (desire), they are unable to shake off their longing. It is this close relationship (encapsulated in one word) between ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht) that lurks behind each longing waiting to turn the feeling into a destructive, self-defeating force.If it is true that the word Sehnsucht is untranslatable - and indeed most languages make do with the word Verlangen (desir, desire or longing) or Nostalgie (nostalgie, nostalgia) - this is no way means that the feeling of Sehnsucht is a state of mind peculiar to German speakers. The feeling of Sehnsucht is universal. And it is in the non-verbal means of expression - in painting, music and the visual arts - that this universal nature can be seen to best advantage.- Christoph Blocher

... plenty of people simply say they aren't broken, they aren't missing anything, they don't have that "inconsolable longing." They've got a happy family in a nice house with a two car garage supported by a good job and nothing bad has happened to them, and they just don't think they have cause to suspect they long for anything more. Of these people, John Kramp, author of 'Out of Their Faces and Into their Shoes,' wisely reminds us, "You can be lost and not know it."- Jared Wilson

No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth. You pull the shade on the snow falling, white on white, and the child comes to life for a moment. There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die? The child in us lives in a world where nothing is too familiar or unpromising to open up into the world where a path unwinds before our feet into a deep wood, and when that happens, neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again ...- Frederick Buechner

T.S. Eliot talked about "the permanent things" from time to time. He was exquisitely conscious of what happens to a civilization - indeed, to mankind itself - when those fixities are jettisoned in favor of the fugitive appetites of mere society. What you get, eventually, is the rule of taste, which would seem to be promising enough (after all, we want to be cultivated and discriminating people), except that there is a sublime mockery at work in things. It is that taste itself, when it ceases to recognize that is is very far from being the jewel in the crown of our human dignity, becomes frivolous and debauched. In order to remain the noble thing that it is, it must serve, and be judged by, Goodness.- Thomas Howard

The consequences of homogenised mass culture plus the failure of our education system and our contempt for books and art (it's either entertainment or elitist, never vital and democratic), mean that not reading cuts off the possibility of private thinking, or of a trained mind, or of a sense of self not dependent on external factors.A trained mind is a mind that can concentrate. Attention Deficit Disorder is not a disease; it is a consequence of not reading. Teach a child to read and keep that child reading and you will change everything. And yes, I mean everything.- Jeanette Winterson

Writers with nothing to write about invariably start covering themselves up with sex and gore, if only because they realize, almost instinctively, that those two subjects can be described and understood by otherwise hollow people.- Bryan F. Griffin

The Digital Age has embroiled the young in a swirl of social groupings and contests, and it threatens their intellectual development. This is not a benign evolution of old media into new media, traditional literacy into e-literacy. It is a displacement. Digital tools have designs on the eyes and ears of the kids, and they pursue them aggressively. Once youths enter the digital realm, the race for attention begins, and it doesn't like to stop for a half-hour with a novel or a trip to a museum. Digital offerings don't like to share, and tales of Founding Fathers and ancient battles and Gothic churches can't compete with a message from a boyfriend, photos from the party, and a new device in the Apple Store window ... Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.... They have all the advantages of modernity and democracy, but when the gifts of life lead to social joys, not intellectual labor, the minds of the young plateau at age 18. This is happening all around us. The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now.- Mark Bauerlein

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,Storm and adventure, heat and cold,If schooners, islands, and maroons,And buccaneers, and buried gold,And all the old romance, retoldExactly in the ancient way,Can please, as me they pleased of old,The wiser youngsters of today:So be it, and fall on! If not,If studious youth no longer crave,His ancient appetites forgot,Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,Or Cooper of the wood and wave:So be it, also! And may IAnd all my pirates share the graveWhere these and their creations lie!- Robert Louis Stevenson

In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.- Ernest Hemingway

Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not ... The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, a total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. When there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.- Flannery O'Connor

Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything (including the irresponsible quest of thrills); so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama ... One is inclined, indeed, to ask, in certain moods, whether the net result of the movement that has been sweeping the Occident for several generations may not be a huge mass of standardized mediocrity; and whether in this country in particular we are not in danger of producing in the name of democracy one of the most trifling brands of the human species that the world has yet seen.- Irving Babbitt

We all learned a lot of things in Willesden Green Library, and we learned how to learn things, which is more important. I learned that 'Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it' and that the Brontes had a brother. I found out who Henry V was and what Malcolm X did. I came to understand why silence is necessary for serious study, and what the point of coffee is. I discovered that there exist people who write not just books, but books about books, and finding that out changed my life.- Zadie Smith

But pushing boundaries means nothing if a writer doesn't love language itself. A novel in which the words are used merely to convey a story seems to me a waste of words. I want to hear the instrument cherished and played exquisitely. I want to read sentences and phrases that sing on the page.- Mark Haddon

Over the last 100 years the loss of the religious as a reputable discourse in common life has led to a poverty of language, and thus to a poverty of contemplative thought and feeling about what we are, and what we need. We need some inner stuff, scaffolding to help us get around our inside space, something to help us map, explore and even settle those places where we are still primitive ...What is that part of being human which is touched by silence, which recognizes an intense atmosphere when people are moved, which gets scared or exhilarated when alone in a big space, or when faced with a newborn baby?- Jane Davis

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true that they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the 'Chartreuse de Parme' by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.- Ernest Hemingway

... Mr. Roosevelt said that his hearers had read to their sorrow the works of Henry James. He bore the same relation to other literary men that a poodle did to other dogs. The poodle had his hair combed and was somewhat ornamental, but never useful. He was invariably ashamed to imitate the British lion. In Mr. Roosevelt’s opinion there were many traits in the “Poodle Henry James” that the independents of the Henry James order of intellect had in common. These men formed quite a number of the bolters this year. They were possessed of refinement and culture to see what was wrong, but possessed none of the robuster virtues that would enable them to come out and do the right ...- The New York Times, Sunday, October 19, 1884

And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man. If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.- Russell Kirk